Welcome to Writing the stories behind your photos

Thank you for choosing the Writing the Stories Behind your Photos course. I do hope you will find it useful and enjoyable.

A collection of photos is a great way of looking back and recalling memories but behind each of your photos there are hidden details and information that can easily be overlooked or forgotten.

Photos not only tell the story of an event, a place or people, they are also part of our social history. In this course we therefore want to show you how you can look for the stories behind your photos and start to create your own pieces of history.

Because a photo has the power to stimulate your imagination and inspire ideas they act as a great starting point for new and inexperienced writers.

You may be a family or local history researcher with a large but random collection of photographs, or you may have a collection of personal or family photos taken over the course of your life or you may simply have some photos which inspire you to dig a bit deeper. Whatever your motivation, we hope this short course will inspire you to look behind your pictures and get scribbling.

It doesn’t matter what your aspirations are as a writer (writing a full-length book, writing short stories, writing articles or blogs) sometimes the scale of the task can seem a bit daunting and so starting with small manageable bite-sized pieces of writing is a good way to start. And the process can been made even simpler by using photos as an inspiration for bite-sized stories or narratives which could ultimately become the building blocks for something longer.

Just one photo is all you need to get started

Photos are a great trigger for writing. They provide a wealth of information and often some surprising hidden details which can be used to create unique and fascinating stories.So, this course is all about finding photos which inspire you, brainstorming all the information you can from the photoand then turning everything you have come up with into a story (as short or as long as you want).

The course is divided into the following lessons:

Lesson 1 Choosing a photo

Lesson 2 Taking a closer look at a photo

Lesson 3 Digging even deeper

Lesson 4 Looking beyond the photo

Lesson 5 Creating a photo storyboard

Lesson 6 More than a caption

Lesson 7 Starting to plan your story

Lesson 8 The five Ws of story telling

Lesson 9 Some basic writing tips

Lesson 10 Some alternative writing styles

At the end of each lesson there is an assignment which you should complete before moving on to the next lesson. To help you compete the assignments, there is an complementary course workbook which includes the assignments for all of the lessons. To download and print it click on the following link: